The Insider Pick:

A good night's sleep is essential to your overall health and well being. The best sleep trackers can help you catch more zzzs with actionable advice and metrics. The SleepScore Max is the best sleep tracker because it actively gives suggestions on how to improve your sleep and your health.

Sleep is a pretty important part of our life. On average, humans spend around a third of their lives asleep, and while that sounds like a lot, it makes sense. After all, sleep is when your body heals itself after a long day. Still, all too many of us take sleep for granted, and that’s a problem. Some studies indicate that as many as 30% of adults suffer from some level of insomnia. Being able to track your sleep can be super helpful because you can use the data to help tweak your sleeping habits and improve your quality of sleep.

There are many sleep trackers to choose from, and they range in price from $50 to hundreds of dollars. As a note, for this guide, we’re only testing dedicated sleep trackers — not wearables. Those wearables aren’t really sleep trackers, anyway. They’re fitness trackers that can monitor sleep, too.

There are a few things you’ll want to consider before you buy a sleep tracker. For starters, you’ll want to think about the metrics you want to track. Some trackers can monitor your heart rate, while others rely on breathing patterns to track your sleep. You’ll also want to think about the form of the tracker. Some have strips that you place under your mattress, while others cover your entire bed under your sheet, and others still use infrared to detect movement from your nightstand.

Another important aspect of sleep trackers is the app they connect to. Each of our picks has an easy-to-use app for your phone or computer, though some give better advice than others. We tested several sleep trackers to find our top picks.

Updated on 01/31/2018 by Christian de Looper: Added the SleepScore Max as our top pick to replace our former top pick, the older S+ sleep tracker.

The best sleep tracker overall

SleepScore

Why you'll love it: The SleepScore Max is a nice looking sleep tracker with an awesome app that gives you helpful tips and tricks to get better sleep.

ResMed doesn’t just track sleep, it also manufactures medical-grade equipment for sleep disorders, including CPAP masks, machines, and so on. It's safe to say, the company not only has the tech to help people improve their sleep patterns, but ResMed also has the medical experience to give good advice. The company first entered the consumer market with the S+ sleep tracker, which was our previous top pick, but now it has partnered with SleepScore to put its tech into an even better sleep tracking device.

The device is relatively small and stylish, and it allows you to track sleep without the need for a wristband or sensors under your sheets. It sits on your nightstand and tracks your movement through the night, as well as the light level, noise in the room, and more.

At the end of the night, you can check the app to see how long you slept, and how much of your shuteye time was light, deep, or REM sleep. You'll also see your sleep score, which rates you based on all these factors.

Like the S+ before it, the best thing about the SleepScore Max is the app because it's great at helping you set goals and track your sleep patterns. The app even gives you tips on a daily basis to help you sleep better and fall asleep faster.

The SleepScore Max may be our top pick, but it’s not totally perfect. The metrics it tracks, for example, aren’t as in-depth as some other devices, though for most people that won’t be a big deal.

The best sleep tracker for couples

Eight Mattress

Why you'll love it: The Eight sleep tracker works with any bed, is easy to set up, automatically tracks your sleep, and can track two people's sleep.

The Eight sleep tracker fits under your fitted sheet and automatically starts tracking when you get into bed, so you can install it, then only check your sleep score and sleep data when you want to find out about it. There's no need to remember to head into the app every night, and no need to worry about whether or not the device is tracking. On top of that, it’s an excellent tracker for couples, because you can set it up to track two people.

That’s a pretty big deal because many couples sleep in the same bed, but few trackers can monitor both people. There’s a good reason for that. Tracking two people poses some pretty serious technological challenges, and Eight’s tracker isn’t perfect in that respect.

For example, sometimes it mistook one sleeper rolling over toward the middle as them getting out of bed, so if you want to keep continued and accurate tracking, you’ll have to ensure that you stay on your side of the bed.

Eight starts tracking as soon as you get into bed and stops as soon as you get out, so if you tend to use your phone or read in bed, it will affect your sleep score. You can manually edit when you got in and out of bed, but there seemed to be bugs in the app where doing that affected parameters during the rest of the night.

Still, those issues aside, the tracker is pretty good at delivering results related to your sleep, and the app is really easy to use. You’ll be able to see things like your average heart rate, repertory rate, average bed temperature, average room temperature, and more. The tracker even has a built-in bed warmer, which you can schedule or turn on and off from the app. You can link it with your Google Fit and Apple Health account to manage and track your overall health.

The best sleep tracker for athletes

Why you'll love it: The Emfit QS is pretty easy to use, but the best thing about it is how in-depth its tracking capabilities are.

Some of the sleep trackers on this list are a little superficial, but the Emfit QS is anything but. In fact, this is the tracker that offers the most in-depth information, making it perfect for people like athletes, who want to finely tune their sleeping habits and track exactly what their body does when they snooze.

The Emfit QS comes in the form of a non-intrusive strip of sensors that you’ll place under your mattress. Those sensors can track an extremely wide range of metrics, including heart rate, heart rate variability (RMSSD), breathing rate, total recovery, integrated recovery, and different classes of sleep. That’s pretty impressive, especially for such a basic device. Not only that, but it tracks all this automatically, so there's no need to set it to start at the beginning of the night.

The Emfit QS isn’t perfect. We found it to be a little more useful for those who want to see the tracked metrics rather than those who want an overall sleep score. That’s because the tracker tended to be very generous in giving a high sleep score. Even on a night when the Eight tracker gave me less than 40, the Emfit QS gave me 100, which is an indicator of a “very good sleep.”

Another issue is that the Emfit QS does not offer a mobile app. Instead, it uploads data to the cloud, and you’ll then be able to see it from your computer by logging in to a website.

Still, the information on offer here could prove to be invaluable, and while it may take a little learning to figure out what all the information means, it’s still nice to have that information in the first place.

The best sleep tracking ecosystem

Why you'll love it: The Sleepace RestOn tracks sleep relatively accurately, but the best thing about it is how well it works with other Sleepace devices.

Sleepace is perhaps best-known for its RestOn tracker, but the company has developed a range of devices that all work together, so if you want one app to control a smart light, speaker, and sleep tracker all in one, then Sleepace is the company for you.

The RestOn tracker itself comes in the form of a small band that you’ll place underneath your sheet and above your mattress. Sure that does mean it can be felt under the sheet, but it’s not all that uncomfortable, and you will get used to it.

When you get into bed each night, you’ll simply hit the “start sleep” button, and when you get up in the morning, you press the “stop sleep” button. This ensures that unlike some other trackers, it won’t track time that you spend in bed not trying to sleep, like, for example, if you spend hours on your phone each night before trying to sleep, something that could negatively affect your sleep score if taken into consideration.

Through the app, you can also see reports about the different metrics tracked through the night, and you can add multiple devices. Why would that be important? Well, we tested the device with the Sleepace Nox, a speaker and smart light designed to shine warm and cool lights depending on the time of day, and play soothing sounds to help you sleep through the night.

All of the devices work together well to ensure you not only track your sleep accurately, but that you can also get to sleep relatively easy.

Pros: Works with multiple devices, tracking is relatively accurate, inexpensive

The best sleep tracker for kids

Sleep Number is a respected brand that’s well known for using technology to improve the sleeping experience. The company only recently started getting into sleep tracking, but it’s come out with a few pretty impressive products since then, including the Sleep Number SleepIQ Kids K1 mattress.

The sleep tracking system has been tweaked to work specifically for kids. You can pair it with your phone to track how well your child is sleeping, and you can even set the app to notify you if they leave the bed.

The app will reward kids for getting a good night’s sleep with a gold star, which could prove to be a good incentive for getting kids to sleep. Last but not least, the bed comes equipped with a night light that can be turned on or off through the app.

Of course, while everything works together pretty well, it’s not cheap. This is a sleep tracker that’s built into a mattress, so you’re buying everything together, and it starts at $799. Still, if you’re in the market for a new kid’s mattress, it may well be worth it for you.

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